Weekly Report - 11 April 2019 (WR-19-14)

MEXICO: New ally and old foe give López Obrador headache

When Andrés Manuel López Obrador assumed the Mexican presidency in December last year he must have thought that education reform would be the most straightforward of all the challenges facing him. It is not playing out that way. López Obrador won the electoral backing of the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (CNTE) after promising to annul the education reform introduced in 2013 which the country’s second-largest teachers’ union has fought tooth and nail. With the CNTE in tow and the country’s main teachers’ union, the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (SNTE), toothless, what could go wrong? Four months later the CNTE is up in arms against López Obrador’s proposed education reform and the SNTE could soon get some fangs back with veteran powerbroker Elba Esther Gordillo bidding for the presidency of the union.